Is it true Biden's asked Neil Kinnock to write his V-P nomination acceptance speech?
Whatever the case, in the Daily Telegraph we read the details of a now legendary plagiarism.
"Joe Biden plagiarised Neil Kinnock speech"
What's in a quote? For Joe Biden, his plagiarisation of a speech delivered by Neil Kinnock, then Labour leader, helped put pay to his own campaign to win the Democrats' presidential nomination more than 20 years ago.
The speech by Mr Kinnock, as he desperately tried to remodel and rebuild the Labour Party, was widely judged to be a dramatic and powerful piece of political rhetoric - making it particularly tempting, but also unusually unwise, for Mr Biden to borrow its most significant passage without attribution to the British politician.
NEIL KINNOCK at Welsh Labour Party conference May 1987:
"Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand"JOE BIDEN IN Sept 1987 during his first presidential campaign:
"Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife... is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? ...Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It's because they didn't have a platform on which to stand."Incidentally, Kinnock was awarded a peerage in 2005 and now sit in the House of Lords.
But when he was a political leader his nickname was "the Welsh windbag."
Does that bring someone else to mind?
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